Andrew conducts the communications efforts for MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing and its research groups, including the Center for Civic Media from 2008 to 2015. A native of Washington, D.C., he holds a degree in communication from Wake Forest University, with a minor in humanities, as well as an M.F.A. in creative writing from Emerson College. His work includes drawing up and executing strategic communications plans, with projects such as website design, social media management and training, press outreach, product launches, fundraising campaign support, and event promotion.

A blog or BBS (bulletin board system) is great for chronologically ordering stories or conversations, but the serial format leaves much to desire for exhaustive searches, and two blogs are more than twice as bad. If a cousin of “Jean Deaux” posts that she is looking for news of Jean on one site, and Jean’s friend posts that he is safe on a different site, the cousin might never see it. The greater the number of sites posting lost or found information, the less chance there is that the right people can connect. According to Reed’s Law, the value of a network grows exponentially with the number of its members. Silos, while great for grain, are terrible for information. What is called for is open, interchangeable data.

From Andrew Slack of the Harry Potter Alliance:

I have excellent news! The Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) has raised since 2 pm on Saturday $42,899 for Partners In Health - by the time I wake up, it is likely to have broken $43,000.

Our livestream on Saturday which featured Dale laying out the importance of Partners In Health, went on for over 5 hours and had 19,000 unique visitors and at one point 1800 people on at the same time.

The project was called Helping Haiti Heal (#hhh) and made around number 7 on Twitter's trending topics.

Yesterday, with the help of dozens of people from multiple organizations, we launched an SMS short code in Haiti!

If you are in Haiti, report emergency info and location by texting 4636.

Subscribers on the DigiCel network in Haiti can now report incidents by sending text messages free of charge to 4636. The shortcode makes it even faster and easier for eyewitnesses to report developments on the ground.

Prabhas [Pokharel] is writing it up. UPDATE: "Earthquake in Haiti: How you can help". Looks like satellite is up, mobile providers intermittently with Digicel most reliable from what we are hearing. Digicel is also donating $5 million. Prabhas is posting for us on all of the efforts we are aware of in the next few hours / feel free to repost that. It'll be a bit of a round-up, though.

TSF (Télécoms Sans Frontières) has deployed a team from the American base in Managua for support in emergency telecoms. They are carrying satellite mobile and fixed telecommunications tools. Reinforcements will also be sent from TSF's international Headquarters. In close contact with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO), they are now flying to Saint-Domingue in order to rejoin Port-au-Prince as soon as possible.

Georgia Popplewell, our managing director, is coordinating coverage. She's pretty swamped now, but would likely have some insights later in the day about what needs, possible projects might be.

Georgia has assembled Tweets that went out following the quake, including the earliest reports that a hospital had collapsed. They also include some of the earliest photos of damage, such as this one uploaded by @LisandroSuero:

A master's student from MIT's Program in Art, Culture and Technology just asked:

Is there a platform for low-cost mesh networking whose nodes could be spread throughout the country? It seems like we should be able to drop hundreds of small solar-powered nodes around the country to provide a low-bandwidth communications infrastructure...

A Harvard Graduate School of Education Ed.D. student, Raygine DiAquoi is going next week to Haiti to the village of Petit Goave to provide aide to orphans in that area. She and colleague Stephanie Desgrottes are accepting donations for supplies for the orphans they will be aiding next week here: http://potekole.wordpress.com/

Thank you, Anonymous for posting that link on the person finder. I have a couple of friends who have relatives or friends who were caught by the earthquake a few weeks ago. They still haven't heard back from them. Hopefully the link will help! God bless you.